May 23 in A.A. History

In 1888, Dr. Nathan Clark Burnham and Matilda Hoyt Spelman [left] were married—likely in the Swedenborgian Church [right]—in Brooklyn, New York. Their first child was Lois, who would marry Bill W.

May in A.A. History—day unknown

In 1954, [early; Pass It On wrongly states 1956] Bill W. received a letter from the notorious robber, kidnapper, and rapist Caryl Chessman [left, 1953], popularly known as “The Red Light Bandit.”

    In May 1948, Chessman was convicted on 17 of 18 counts for crimes committed during the first three weeks of January 1948. He was sentenced to death under California’s “Little Lindbergh Law”^* and, at the time he wrote to Bill, Chessman was on death row at San Quentin Prison [right: inside view, c. 1950s], awaiting execution on May 14. (He was granted a stay. Over nearly twelve years on death row, Chessman filed dozens of appeals, acting as his own attorney, and successfully avoided eight execution dates, often by only a few hours [below center: one headline when he was executed].)

    Later, in 1954, Prentice-Hall published Chessman’s autobiography, Cell 2455, Death Row: A Condemned Man’s Own Story [left: cover].^†  In it, Chessman drew a comparison between psychopaths and alcoholics. This prompted Jack Alexander, who likely saw a prepublication copy, to encourage him to write to Bill. Alexander wondered whether criminals could “recover” through a surrender similar to that of A.A. members, writing to Bill:

There is a close resemblance between the criminal psychopath and the alcoholic mind. Both are grandiose, resentful, defiant, and hating of authority; both unconsciously destroy themselves trying to destroy others.

    Chessman wrote to Bill that he

… woke up to the fact I’d been nothing more than a cynically clever, aggressively destructive, and sometimes violent damn fool.

    He decided he could do more than just feel sorry for himself:

I could tell my story and plead, not my personal cause, but society’s cause and the cause of those who—in my opinion, needlessly—are criminally damned and doomed.… I am most hopeful it will make a very useful contribution to a most vexing social problem.

    Bill replied on May 3. It is unknown whether Chessman ever saw the letter.

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^* This law had been repealed by the time Chessman’s trial began but was in effect at the time of his crimes, and the repeal was not retroactive.
^† Chessman began writing this memoir after San Quentin Prison Warden Harley Teets encouraged him to do something with his life. With Teets’s support, he chronicled his descent into what he called criminally insane behavior. When the book was published, it became a bestseller and was adapted into a movie of the same name in 1955. Its success led Teets to try to prevent Chessman from writing anymore; however, three additional books by Chessman were later smuggled out of prison and published. In 1957, Teets died while serving as warden.
    Clinton T. Duffy, the first warden to introduce the A.A. program into prisons and a prominent opponent of the death penalty, was warden when Chessman first arrived. Duffy described him as one of the most dangerous men he had ever met: tough, mean, contemptuous, arrogant, deviant, a troublemaker, and a constant threat—“Chessman represented nothing.”